By Rosemary Khoo
With Chinese New Year around the corner, it is time to send out my new year greetings again. No more do I conscientiously shop for greeting cards and write addresses on pink envelopes. My working years had seen my sendees’ list growing longer, with cards sent out to colleagues and acquaintances that were formal, classy, and unexciting.
Now moving along with digital and green demands, I create my own personalised e-cards.
Lunar New Year would see me traipsing though Chinatown at night to take pictures of the splendid light-up on my handphone. These pictures, together with lines I pen, would embellish my greeting card, and should my Muse fortuitously descend, the lines would transform into a respectable poem, to which I would add my picture to make it more meaningful.
Below is my 2019 CNY card, with a full-length photo to show off the gift (a pair of flared pants with gorgeous embroidery) from my dear friend Christine, who had retired from helming the creative arts at NUS. My poem touches on the stark contrast between the gaiety of CNY shopping in Chinatown and my childhood memories of squalor along the same street. I remember vividly the dark congested cubicles which in the early 1960s, served as homes for many, including my Outram secondary school students.
For Chinese New Year 2022, I created two types of cards for friends and relatives. As 2022 looks like another uncertain pandemic year, my poem below is to give encouragement to my friends and ex-students to ride on the back of the Tiger and embrace its courage and wisdom. Man, creature and nature must live together in harmony.
For my large Peranakan clan, I decided to adopt a Peranakan motif and compose a poem ‘A Nonya’s Love of Sensory Things’. The Peranakan tradition is slowly disappearing and often we long for its nuances, although as a child, the weight of nonya tradition was hard to bear and I wanted to flee from it. The card represents my symbolic CNY visit with my greetings in Baba Malay.
My poem takes a somewhat hilarious look at the Peranakan excesses, feistiness and fussiness – a pure spectacle of colour and noise when everything comes together! As a true blue Peranakan, I am wearing a sarong kebaya, which my relatives, Pru and Kat, helped me choose for my niece Annabel’s wedding in 2019. In the poem, a pearl reference pops out here and there, to bring a sparkle to my five sisters, who call me by my childhood name, Choo. Like many older persons, they suffer from aches and pains and my eldest sister recently lost her husband. So conjuring up images of our growing up during the 1950s in the Peranakan enclave of Blair Road entertain us no end, as we laugh at our childhood foibles and scapes.
Every new year, we would obediently kneel or bow before our elders to honour them and receive their blessing and angpows, amid expressions of good fortune and abundance of food.
Here are my good wishes for you in my ‘over the top’ CNY card as we welcome the Water Tiger in 2022!
Selamat Taon Baru! Happy New Year! 新年快乐! Gong Xi Fa Cai!
About me
I am a retired educationist and applied linguist, and was NUS Senior Fellow at the Department of English Language and Literature. I have been working for the cause of women’s development and seniors’ well-being, as Founding President of University Women’s Association (UWAS, now GWAS), and NUS Senior Alumni.
